text | 89Typography helped seal the literary notion of “the text” as a complete,
original work, a stable body of ideas expressed in an essential form. Before
the invention of printing, handwritten documents were riddled with errors.
Copies were copied from copies, each with its own glitches and gaps.
Scribes devised inventive ways to insert missing lines into manuscripts in
order to salvage and repair these laboriously crafted objects.
Printing with movable type was the first system of mass production,
replacing the hand-copied manuscript. As in other forms of mass
production, the cost of manufacturing (setting type, insuring its correctness,
and running a press) drops for each unit as the size of the print run
increases. Labor and capital are invested in tooling and preparing the
technology, rather than in making the individual unit. The printing system
allows editors and authors to correct a work as it passes from handwritten
manuscript to typographic galley. “Proofs” are test copies made before final
production begins. The proofreader’s craft ensures the faithfulness of the
printed text to the author’s handwritten original.
Yet even the text that has passed through the castle gates of print is
inconstant. Each edition of a book represents one fossil record of a text, a
record that changes every time the work is translated, quoted, revised,
interpreted, or taught. Since the rise of digital tools for writing and
publishing, manuscript originals have all but vanished. Electronic redlining
is replacing the hieroglyphics of the editor. Online texts can be downloaded
by users and reformatted, repurposed, and recombined.
Print helped establish the figure of the author as the owner of a text, and
copyright laws were written in the early eighteenth century to protect the
author’s rights to this property. The digital age is riven by battles between
those who argue, on the one hand, for the fundamental liberty of data and
ideas, and those who hope to protect—sometimes indefinitely—the
investment made in publishing and authoring content.
A classic typographic page emphasizes the completeness and closure of a
work, its authority as a finished product. Alternative design strategies in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflect the contested nature of
authorship by revealing the openness of texts to the flow of information and
the corrosiveness of history.errors and ownership
Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration
to a portable commodity. —marshall mcluhan, 1962On the future of
intellectual property, see
Lawrence Lessig, Free
Culture: How Big Media
Uses Technology and the Law
to Lock Down Culture and
Control Creativity (New
York: Penguin, 2004).Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
(Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1962).